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I often remind executives that when they Tweet something, they are every time providing a quote for a reporter and need to take that into consideration that the contents of the tweet could show up again.

I was reminded of this myself in Sunday’s Sacramento Bee, in the Travel Column by Sam McManis when confronted with a Tweet I had sent nearly a month earlier while waiting for a plane:

THE TWEET

From Josh Morgan (@joshdmorg): “Dear all airport PA announcer script writers, can you stop saying ‘due to increased security.’ It’s been increased for 13 years now.”

Over the past few weeks I’ve spoken with quite a few broadcasters about how social media can be used. Along the way, I pulled together quite a few resources, linked below, that can be helpful to broadcasters. While this happening, the world was enveloped in a Sharknado. The success of this less than B movie created by the SyFy channel opened the eyes of many in broadcasting to the power of social media to do what is most important to them, drive ratings and make money.

Next, let’s talk about the different audiences within the world of broadcasting. There are two different sides here, the ‘talent,’ into which I’m lumping the programming and those who create the content for TV and radio station sites and social, and the “Business,” which includes the general managers and sales teams. While everyone is interested in ratings, the talent is also right now interested in other metrics like engagement. The Business side is all about ratings, and all about dollars…right now. If it’s not driving revenue or ratings, it’s a cost and they don’t have extra dollars to spend right now. That’s why many of the stats I found during my research were so interesting. Let’s start with ratings. Twitter can help them. How? According to Nielsen:

That looks interesting, but it gets better, it’s not the same across all types of programming:

If you really want to increase ratings via Twitter, it looks like “competitive reality” programming is where to go according to the chart above, again from Nielsen, via MarketingLand.

Lastly, we can’t talk TV and Twitter and not reference Sharknado.

The above shows how Craig Engler, SVP at @Syfy digital and runs the @syfy account, used Twitter leading into the airing of Sharknado to start building the buzz among the network’s followers. According to articles at the time, 111,000 people tweeted 318,232 times during the broadcast according to SGI yes owned by Nielsen. Tweets per minute during the broadcast reached 5,010, according to Topsy Pro.

Celebrities even got into the mix with the likes of Patton Oswalt, Seth Myers, Erin Andrews and even Mia Farrow tweeting about this instant phenomenon.

In this case ratings for the first broadcast didn’t match the buzz, BUT according to Wikipedia, “Syfy repeated Sharknado on Thursday, July 18, 2013, one week after its premiere. The airing was watched by 1.89 million viewers, an increase of 38% over its initial airing.[13] On July 27th, a 3rd airing of Sharknado got 2.1 million viewers, continuing the increase in popularity of the movie and setting a record for most watched Original Movie encore in Syfy history.”

Syfy said that 566,000 of those viewers were between the ages of 18 and 49, which is about 30 percent better than the numbers for the channel’s other wacky movies this year,” showing growth in their key demo and in the sweet spot of Twitter. Looks to me like Syfy knows their audience.

Growing up in the 80’s one of the definitive lines when thinking about car keys is from “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince….hmm…wonder if either of them did anything after that?

Oh-kay, here’s the situation

My parents went away on a week’s vacation and

They left the keys to the brand new Porsche

Would they mind?

Umm, well, of course not

I’ll just take it for a little spin

And maybe show it off to a couple of friends

Well what happens when the “Porsche,” is your company’s social media channels and the “parents” are laying off significant amounts of the staff?

Twitter gets a lot of credit for bringing people together into groups and quickly harnessing the power of many behind a common cause. Today, we saw Twitter in action. Sometimes, Twitter can be a force for good, and can inspire profound change in the world. Not in this case. Today, Twitter quickly brought together a group of people behind a common cause that I can not support: the use of sour cream on burritos.

If you’ve seen my Twitter bio, you know my feelings on this subject:

At a little after 5 p.m. today in response to a comment about Sacramento ranking relatively high on Forbes recent ranking of “Miserable Cities,” someone invoked my thoughts on sour cream on burritos:

Over the next half hour, more and more people became involved

The next step is the formal organization of the group:

They create a common rally flag:

That’s how a revolution begins, with some people with a common idea and a common goal, even if it is, like in this case, misguided.

To those, who support this cause I support you and stand with you to say “Viva La Crema!” Even if it’ll never be on my burrito.

For the past six months whenever I have been giving presentations about social media to government groups the questions most often asked involve the use of Twitter. Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows you to post short messages (up to 140 characters) to those that “follow” you, or choose to receive your information, and allows you to receive messages from those that you choose to follow. Think of it like a CB.

Twitter has picked up a lot of steam over the last few quarters and during the presidential election moved to at least the consciousness of much of the mainstream as presidential candidates embraced the technology and national news organizations used the service as a way to communicate breaking news.

Here in Sacramento, the recent budget negotiations served to bring the service to the attention of many who had not yet tuned in. the driver seemed to be John Myers of KQED, you can find him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/KQED_CapNotes.

Tomorrow, Tuesday 6/17/08, I’m going to be out of the office most of the day at the New California 100 conference. If you’re going to be there, drop me a note, here, or on Twitter, and track me down. If you do participate in part of the conference it would be great if you could tag your content with ‘newcalifornia100.’